iPod Vending Machine
This was my first actual full day at the MacIT conference. Most of the sessions I attended were on subject I already new a fair amount about, but one can always learn more and it’s always good to get an idea about whether you’ve been doing things the right or wrong way all these years.
The sessions I attended on this day were:
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM: Learning to Write Shell Scripts for Mac OS X
David A. Pugh, System Administrator, and John Stewart, Computer Systems Consultant, both from the University of Michigan presented a dry subject in a relatively entertaining manor that made correct syntax sufferable if not mildly scintillating.
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM: MacIT Best Practices
Michael Volchok (President, Volchok Consulting, Inc.) compared and contrasted two fictional companies (actually real but the names have been changed to protect the innocent) to exemplify current best practices in it support. His best practice methodologies being predominantly based on ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) which is I discovered to my surprise not very well known in the states whilst being widely adopted in Europe and Australia.
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM: J2EE Web Services on Mac OS X
Jonathan Maron, Consultant Member of Tech Staff, Oracle. I’m a web developer by trade and currently working as a Webmaster but this session was way to technical for me. I was also starting to suffer a bit of brain drain at this time.
When not in the conference sessions I spent my time on the floor of the Exhibition. Despite there being a number of interesting product (most outside my field of expertise) and may not available in Australia I really think that MacWorld should have been renamed iPodAccessoryWorld or more accurately iPodCaseWorld.
Having done our dash at MacIT for the day Jason and I hooked up again to take advantage of the 11% discount offered to overseas travellers at Macey’s. Here we also saw the fantastic iPod (PSP) vending machines for the first time which are operated by Zoom Systems.